As a basis of a family, marriage has been attributed a lot of definitions. Thus, according to the popular approach, marriages are the communions which are taken from Heaven. Goethe believed that marriage was the beginning and the peak of every culture, while Proudhon considered it to be the sacred face of justice ad the mystery of universal harmony.
Dictionaries usually define marriage as the free and consented union between a man and a woman, a union which is performed under the law and which is meant to lead to a new family being founded. Most of the journalists and of the lawyers also accept this definition as being the most accurate one. Some jurists also introduce their own approaches in the definition of this concept, these approaches having more or less to do with their religion. Ronasc, for instance, considered that the legal act through which a man and a woman establish a connection between themselves is a union the law imposes and which can be broken whenever they want. In the legal terminology, the word “marriage” is used in the following situations.
First of all, it is used to define a legal document the future spouses sign according to the law. Also, it is used to define the celebration of the marriage itself, which means that it refers to the official ceremony within which the document is signed. Then, it is defined at a status, a status which is included in the family code and which refers to a legal institution, therefore being a set of regulations which determine and reign over this concept.
Looking at things from a general point of view, the act of marriage resembles the agreement very much, also being a bilateral legal act, but it also covers the conception that everyone has the right to get married whenever they want and whomever they want to get married to. Also, once they get married, the two partners become equal in rights and in everything else, the marriage annulling all their privileges except for those which have to do with their personal goods, which are not be partitioned in case of a divorce. Marriage is a civil act as it can only be completed by a local authority. Also, this is supposed to be an agreement which is signed for life, but it seems that there are more and more cases in which doesn’t happen because the number of divorces in a continuous increase. The husband and wife are supposed to stay together for better and for worse, but more and more people seem to forget these words or simply do not value them, a divorce being an event just as significant as the marriage itself.
Of course, everyone has the right to get married, just like everyone has the right to get divorced if they consider there is nothing else they can do to save their marriage. However, marriage is supposed to fix the bases for a new family, while a divorce only separates a family which should never be separated.
